I spent 5 days in the mountains with limited access to Twitter, and it was great

The author near the summit of Beartooth Pass, in Wyoming, on August 17.Josh Barro/Business Insider

I
just got back from a five-day trip to Wyoming, where I visited
Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks and watched the total
solar eclipse from Casper.

Wyoming's national parks are stunningly beautiful, and the
eclipse was awesome. But my favorite thing about the trip may
have been the spotty cellphone service, which made it impossible
for me to keep close tabs on the news, or on social media about
the news.

I haven't felt so relaxed in two years.

A lot of us are allowing politics to consume our lives and making
ourselves miserable in the process. At least I get paid for it.
What's your excuse?

Having returned from the wilderness, my advice to you is this:
Give yourself permission to think less often about Donald Trump
and to argue less often about politics.

Think less about matters beyond your control and more about what
you can do to bring yourself contentment.

It will make you happier, I think.

Panic is a privilege - but not an enjoyable one

When I tell people to worry less about politics, I usually get
responses about how this is an easy thing for a privileged white
man to say. The people making this admonition are often quite
privileged themselves.

The ability to maintain a state of permanent panic about the
president can itself be a mark of privilege. People can direct
their primary emotional energies toward worrying about national
politics when they don't have intense material concerns in their
personal lives - and when they believe national politics has high
stakes for the cultural power people like them can wield.

We see the privilege of panic manifesting in the political
"hobbyism" the political scientist
Eitan Hersh describes among the middle and upper classes,
especially on the left. And we see it in the turnout
differentials in special elections: The energy of the #Resistance
is driving superior turnout among college-educated Democrats and
independents, but not among working-class Democrats, white or
black.

A higher aggregate level of worry probably is good for turnout.
But allowing politics to make you personally miserable does
nothing to elect Democrats or contain the president.

If you inventory the time you spend on political activities -
this includes time spent arguing with people on Twitter and
Facebook - how much is going toward actions that can affect
political outcomes, and how much is a recreational activity you
aren't even enjoying?

You have no moral obligation to engage in the latter.

On the trail to Hidden Falls in Grand Teton National Park.Josh Barro/Business Insider

Arguments are optional

Over the past couple of years, I have discovered the enjoyable
luxury of declining to participate in daily outrage stories.
Sometimes I smile inwardly, knowing that I disagree with strongly
held opinions on the internet and that their holders cannot force
me to engage.

Since all of culture is political now, there is pressure for
politically engaged people to take stands even on controversies
far afield from public policy. I remind myself that this, too, is
optional.

I mostly succeed at not caring about what Lena Dunham is up to. I
have no view on whether it was appropriate to shoot Harambe.

Having so thoroughly enjoyed my time in the deep woods where my
phone could not provide alerts, I've resolved to form and express
even fewer opinions about hot-button controversies when doing so
is not a professional necessity.

You should feel free to reserve your political outrage for issues
that matter and to enjoy sports or entertainment or food - or whatever
nonpolitical hobbies you'll have more time to engage with when
you spend less time worrying about Trump - without thinking about
their political implications at all. You don't owe it to anyone
else to fret or argue or posture.

You can even enjoy athletes and pop stars with strong political
opinions that differ from yours. They may be rich and famous, but
one bit of power you have over them is the freedom to disregard
their dumb opinions and just focus on the thing that made them
famous in the first place.

I think a lot of the cultural divides in America could be bridged
if people on the right and left remembered that, except for
actual political figures, famous people's political opinions only
matter if you allow them to matter to you.

Or go spend some time in the woods, where the stupid opinions of
famous people or your relatives can't even reach you.

Jackson Lake in Grand Teton National Park.Josh Barro/Business Insider

There is more to life than the government

I think a reason I've maintained relative sanity during this
administration is a healthy perspective on the importance of
public policy. There are a lot of problems Americans can fix on
their own, and there are a lot of other problems the government
is unlikely to fix, no matter who is elected.

I've written before about
the tail risks of Trump, and his presidency poses a small but
alarming risk of terrible outcomes like nuclear exchange and
great-power war. But assuming he does not get us all killed, the
policy effects of his administration are mostly looking very
modest, except for increased enforcement against illegal
immigration.

Besides, policy change is probably less important than you think.
The federal government is not as good at fixing problems as
liberals like to believe, nor as prone to creating them as
conservatives fear.

House Speaker Paul Ryan says America has the worst tax system in
the advanced world. Yet somehow we have the highest per-capita
gross domestic product of any large country. This partly reflects
that Ryan is overselling the horrors of our tax code. But it also
reflects that tax policy is less important for investment
decisions and economic growth than policymakers like to claim.

The Affordable Care Act is probably saving tens of thousands of
lives a year - an achievement, but a smaller one than its
architects had hoped. Earlier this year, the public-policy
professor Mark Kleiman laid out the strategies to curb problem
drinking that he thinks are reducing all-cause
mortality in South Dakota by 4% a year. If replicated
nationally, this life-saving effect could be several times that
of the ACA.

But the most effective actions to prolong life in America lie
with individual Americans: exercising more, eating better, not
drinking to excess, and managing chronic diseases in accordance
with their doctors' instructions.

About 40% of patients prescribed blood-pressure medication after
a heart attack don't take it as
prescribed. Improving adherence to healthcare - even among
people who have good health insurance - is a public health policy
challenge, but it's also a private one addressable by individual
patients.

One reason people like to focus so much on public policy is that
it provides a distraction from the things we could be doing to
improve our own lives but aren't - it allows us to shift the
conversation to what other people should do for us.

In the long run, won't you do more to make yourself happy by
taking your happiness into your own hands and worrying about the
things you can directly control?

Big Cone, a geyser cone in the West Thumb Geyser Basin, sticking up from Yellowstone Lake.Josh Barro/Business Insider

Life is big

In 1986, 36% of Yellowstone National Park burned in a
particularly devastating fire. There are vast hillsides covered
in dead trunks with short, young trees growing among them. This
is a natural part of the ecosystem. Fires allow light to get to
the forest floor so a more diverse variety of plant life can
thrive, rather than just the tall lodgepole pines.

Fires on this scale happen about every 300 years - they were
happening long before Trump was born, and they will happen long
after he is dead. A visit to Yellowstone is a good reminder of
how much bigger than us nature is, and how we might as well find
a way to enjoy our time on earth while we are here.

This is the part of the article that will prompt several of you
to send me long and agitated emails about climate change. Yes,
Yellowstone is getting hotter, and that will mean an undesirable
increase in forest fires.

But Trump's short administration will have fewer effects on this
long-range issue than you think, in part because the Paris
climate agreement is less important than
you think, and global trends slowing the growth of carbon
emissions are largely outside the control of the United States
government.

More to the point, the lecturing email you're about to send me
won't have any effect on global temperatures at all, except to
the extent you're using fossil fuels to compose it.

Instead of worrying so much about what the government is or isn't
doing, why not take a moment to sit back, feel awe at the things
neither you nor the president can change, disregard the noise,
and breathe.

While I was hiking up Mount Washburn on Friday, the elevation
made it possible for my cellphone to pick up service briefly, and
I got a push alert telling me Steve Bannon had been fired. But I
didn't have enough data service to load the article. So I put my
phone back in my pocket, smiled, and kept hiking up the mountain.